Ashcan Copy

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A cheaply and quickly produced work, not intended to be shown to the masses and disseminated only to the minimum extent required to fulfill some non-artistic obligation like claiming a trademark.

The term originated in The Golden Age of Comic Books, when there was a big rush to copyright as many characters and titles as possible, but the production time available was measured in days or hours, far too short to put out a real comic. The solution? Create a simple mock comic, often just a cover and some unrelated filler made up of garbage sheets, and submit it to the copyright office. The term itself comes from the fact that these comics often weren't actually distributed to newsstands, just going straight to the ashcan (period vernacular for trashcan) once their purpose had been served.

Starting in The Dark Age of Comic Books, an "ashcan" copy of a comic, often black and white and limited in distribution, would sometimes be distributed as a promotional item. These comics were called "ashcans" for marketing reasons (i.e. to imply rarity and value like the Golden Age versions) but really had little to do with Golden Age ashcans.

In the wider culture, "ashcan copy" has stuck around to describe any crappy proof-of-sort-of-concept work that exists solely because of the strange intricacies of trademark and licensing law — especially in the US, where television or movie adaptation contracts often have a "use it or lose it" expiration date by which a license must be exercised to prevent reversion to the original rights holder.

Do not confuse with a somewhat wider use of the term (jocularly with a bit of Self-Deprecation, like miniature comics for promo, mostly freebie), which technically is no longer this trope.

Examples:

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Comic Books

The most widely-known example is Flash Comics, which was actually the title of two different ashcans from different companies seeking claim to the title. DC Comics' Flash Comics combined cover art from Adventure Comics #41 with pages from All-American Comics #8; Fawcett's Flash Comics (also printed under the title Thrill Comics) featured the origin of Captain Thunder, who made his first regular appearance as Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics #2 (there was no Whiz Comics #1).

Fawcett's 5-Cent Comics and Nickel Comics ashcans (black-and-white, no cover art) marked the respective debuts of Dan Dare and Scoop Smith, both of whom subsequently appeared in Whiz Comics. Nickel Comics became a regular series, but without Scoop Smith.

Eerie #1 was a hastily assembled digest of horror comic stories with a print run of a few hundred copies, created by publisher James Warren to deny the title to rival publishers Myron Fass and Robert W. Farrell, whose company was named Eerie Publications.

Following the "DC Implosion" (where DC Comics cancelled a whole bunch of titles all at once) they "published" Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, two 250 page editions of the comics which had been cancelled just to ensure copyright on the stories which had already been written & drawn. Only 35 copies were made, though black-and-white photocopies of the originals exist. The reprint was notable for being the first "appearance" of JLA member Vixen.

DC Comics, owner of Wonder Woman, made a huge mistake at the time of the character's inception: they never thought about making a "Wonder Man". Marvel Comics played a prank on them by doing so first. They didn't take this very seriously: he was a one-time villain who died at the end of the story. But when the rights to this minor character were about to expire (and DC would be able to lay claim to the name), Marvel Comics resurrected the character and gave him a recurring role in the Avengers series, retaining the rights.

Marvel has pulled the same stealth claim trick more than once: after DC sued Fawcett regarding how close Captain Marvel was to their own Superman, Marvel noticed that the superhero's name was legally up for grabs and created their own Captain Marvel (given the company name, they couldn't be blamed). Then DC bought Fawcett and incorporated the now rebranded Shazam into their universe. In order to avoid the trademark falling into disuse and thus becoming available to their biggest competitors, Marvel has had to publish at least one Captain Marvel title every year or two since, leading to a number of ongoing series, limited series and one-shots featuring a range of characters using the Captain Marvel alias (the original Mar-Vell, many of his sons and clones, and the current incarnation who used to go by Ms. Marvel).

Films — Live-Action

While the Ashcan Copy originated in comics, many contemporary cases involve movie concepts optioned from other media, as such contracts usually include reversion clauses and film development is a notoriously lengthy and troubled process.

Marvel has had huge success with movie adaptations of its superhero characters, including the sprawling, interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity, financed and produced in-house. However, three of the most popular Marvel properties — Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men — were conspicuous by their absence in the MCU. Marvel sold off the movie rights to their best-known characters to make ends meet during a period of financial troubles in the late 1990s, even though their characters had never yet been successfully adapted to the big screen. In the 2000s, a new approach to development spearheaded by Jerry Calabrese and Avi Arad lead to a string of successful films by outside studios, and eventually to Marvel experimenting with in-house movie production rather than licensing to other studios. Characters like Iron Man and Captain America were considered second- or third-string heroes in the comics world, but Marvel still held their movie rights free and clear, so they made do with what was available and were rewarded with several smash hits. Since then, Marvel has been very interested in permanently reclaiming properties that could be added to the MCU, and their licensees resorted to ashcanning productions in order to hold on to their movie rights:

The 1994 The Fantastic Four movie was ashcan fodder extraordinaire. The studio was on the verge of losing the rights forever, so it was made cheaply, produced by famed B-Movie schlock-meister Roger Corman, and never got a wide release. It exists only in bootleg copies, some of which have made their way online.

Sony's Spider-Man license was originally doing much better than Fox and the Fantastic Four, and in fact is sometimes credited with kickstarting the current era of superhero movies. However, after Sam Raimi's fourth Spider-Man movie fell apart in the planning stage, a rebooted origin story called The Amazing Spider-Man Series was greenlit with an all-new cast and crew. Critics alleged the project was revived solely to extend Sony's reversion deadline, but the rebooted film was (unexpectedly) a big enough hit to generate talk of a franchise of its own to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Sony confident that Spider-Man was theirs for the foreseeable future. Even before the second film came out, Sony was hyping up spinoffs focusing on Venom and the Sinister Six. However, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 wound up a critical and box office failure, derailing all of Sony's carefully-laid plans to make Peter Parker into a meta-franchise. Sony was scrambling for any viable ideas; at one point, there was talk of a spinoff focused on Aunt May (a rumor that was quickly quashed by Sony, but which people had no problem believing). After the 2014 Sony email hack revealed that they were considering throwing in the towel and cutting a deal with Marvel Studios, pressure from fans who wanted to see Spidey "return home" led Sony to sign a deal in early 2015 to allow reciprocal character appearances with Marvel Studios, improving their chances of holding onto the license in the long term. Accordingly, Spidey's first solo film, Spider-Man: Homecoming was produced by Marvel Studios for Sony, set in the MCU, and quite well received. Despite this, Sony resumed their spinoff plans with Venom (2018) and Silver & Black, which are (allegedly) intended to kick off their own Shared Universe separate from the MCU and highly suggest that Sony's primary concern is to retain creative control over the characters' film appearances.

Of the three major Marvel franchises still held by outside studios, Fox's X-Men Film Series has most successfully avoided the need for an ashcan installment. While the quality of the films has been uneven (from the high of X-Men: Days of Future Past to the low of X-Men Origins: Wolverine), their release schedules have been steady, the budgets have all been what one would expect for a major theatrical release, and the latest installment, Logan, was a massive critical and box office success.

Vampirella: A film based on Vampirella had been in Development Hell for decades under different companies. Roger Corman's company had at some point acquired the rights from the previous property owners but ultimately only made the 1996 film because they only had six months left, requiring them to quickly rush something into production. After an incredibly Troubled Production, the final result was a miscast, critically panned film that the director Jim Wynorski later regretted making at all.

My Name Is Modesty, a 2004 low-budget thriller featuring a young Modesty Blaise, was made so the production company could hold on to the film rights long enough to get things moving on a proper Modesty Blaise film. (As of this writing, they still haven't.) It was released direct to DVD, and for something made so quickly and cheaply it isn't actually terrible.

Before Fox released the aforementioned 2015 version of Fantastic Four, Dragonball Evolution was seen as their biggest example in this department - much like the aforementioned Fan4stic, the main reason for this film's quality was due to Fox pushing it out the door just because the rights were expiring. Although many fans of the source material who have seen the film can name off a list of inconsistencies with the source material, among critics, it's been trashed for being more akin to a drama you'd find on The CW than an action/adventure story - the film attempts to combine the Emperor Pilaf Saga with the King Piccolo Saganote the former is a very lighthearted affair about tracking down the titular Dragon Balls, and features a large amount of slapstick; the latter is a much more serious arc, and can be seen as a precursor to what the series would be like once Goku became an adult, with disastrous results; Justin Chatwin's performance as Goku (an optimistic, carefree Idiot Hero) is an angsty character who is mainly focused with getting the girl (for comparison's sake, Goku thought marriage was a type of food at the age he was when the events the movie is portraying happened in the manganote he did end up marrying Chi-Chi after becoming a teenager...mainly because although he had made the promise not knowing what marriage was, he did intent to keep said promise), and the film is overall seen as a Cliché Stormnote to be fair, most of the elements it has were present in the source material; however, the source material didn't try and do all of them at once. Ironically, the film might end up being one of the best things to happen in the franchise in the long run, since series mangaka Akira Toriyama, who is a notoriously apathetic creator, was appalled by the film, and actively became involved in the production of Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods - something he likely wouldn't have done had he not seen how disastrous the end result of letting other people handle his work without involving him wasnote while the movie would've happened regardless, the script was a much Darker and Edgier version of the final product, portraying Beerus as a much more villainous character. His involvement eventually led to another film, Resurrection 'F', and a new TV series, Dragon Ball Super - in other words, the film made him care about his work. While fans don't have to like the movie, maybe they should be a little grateful to the film.

The little-known fourth Porky's film, Pimpin' Pee Wee was produced on a very hurried schedule in 2009, purely for the purposes of derailing a remake of the first film that Howard Stern was attempting to mount.

Live-Action TV

This trope was parodied in Arrested Development, where a fictional version of the 90s Fantastic Four movie is stated to be one of several movies made by Imagine Entertainment (the studio that makes the show), with the "crappy production" feature of the Ashcan Copy turned Up to 11: Ron Howard was told by a drunk lawyer at the company Christmas party that Imagine's license on Fantastic Four would expire unless a film was made within the next six days. They immediately cast the film with the bartenders from the party, then hired the same bartenders to work the film's wrap party five days later.

Warner Bros. produced a TV pilot called Black Bart based on Blazing Saddles just to retain the sequel rights to that film. Mel Brooks explained that he opposed the studio's desire for sequels and included a clause in his contract that all sequel and spinoff rights would revert to him unless Warner Bros. made a movie or TV show based on the film within six months of theatrical release. Brooks knew that the studio couldn't produce a second movie in that time frame, and that network TV would never be able to get a TV show based on Blazing Saddlespast the broadcast censors. However, Warner Bros. realized that there was a loophole in the contract: to retain the rights, they only had to make a spinoff — there was no requirement to actually air it. So the studio secretly produced a TV pilot with CBS (a 24-minute synopsis of the movie with Louis Gossett Jr. as Bart and language that the network would never allow on air) and put it away for safekeeping. Several years later, they asked Brooks to make a sequel, and when he refused on the grounds that they no longer held the rights, the execs brought Brooks onto the CBS lot and screened the pilot for him to prove their point — although the sequel project died on its merits some time later. The Black Bart pilot only ever saw the light of day as a bonus feature on the Blazing Saddles DVD release.

The 'contractual obligation album'. When an artist wants out of their contract but is required to produce a certain number of albums first, they will often dump the ragtag recordings that didn't make the cut for their other albums (B-sides, demos, live performances, and assorted unreleased content) into a CD case and push it out the door. The appropriately-titled Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album is a typical example. Sometimes, the artist won't even care enough to release previously-unheard material, and will simply compile a Greatest Hits Album to do this.

Bob Dylan's The Copyright Extension Collection was an official 4-CDR release by Sony of many unreleased sessions and alternate takes from the early 60s. Much of this music had remained unreleased simply because it was not commercially viable, but the copyright laws in effect when it was made would open it to the public domain unless the studio publicly exercised its copyright within 50 years. The studio did not want to draw much attention to this calculated business decision, so released the album as a limited edition of 100 copies in just a few European markets with little promotion. The set became immensely popular and copies sell for high prices - the music has not been released again. Ironically, its limited availability and official status has encouraged far more downloading than if it had passed unnoticed into the public domain.

Pinball

After 5 years, the sponsors of the Magic Girl pinball machine were wondering what they would get for their money, and even considering a lawsuit against the creator, given that the last they had seen of the machine was a barely playable prototype at an Expo in 2015. To stave off the lawsuit, in 2017, they all received.. manufactured copies of the same prototype, with all the faults still there, and some additional bugs introduced by expensive parts being missing.

Video Games

In a non-Western example, Japan had a law prohibiting arcade cabinets from being distributed without games. Manufacturers obliged by providing very simple games good for little else but testing the monitors and controls. Sega's Dottori-kun and Taito's Minivader are typical examples, featuring primitive black-and-white graphics and no sound. Konami's Mogura Desse is a slightly more sophisticated example; it has color and sound to go with its highly simplistic gameplay.

In 2007, Atari commissioned a simple flash game produced in just four days in order to maintain trademark on Star Control.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 has been called an Ashcan Copy, given that it was released in a horribly unfinished state with game breaking bugs galore. Professional skateboarder Tony Hawk's long-term contract with Activision, signed in 2002, was set to expire at the end of 2015, and so Activision allegedly rushed the game out the door in September of that year as one last cash-grab (and possibly to generate enough renewed interest to put a new deal on the table).

The Spectrum version of SQIJ! is often considered this. The author wrote it to fulfill his contract with his publisher, The Power House, even though he had no real interest in working for them. The game is horribly slow, has no proper collision detection, and shipped with a game-breaking bug caused by the Caps Lock key being incorrectly enabled.

Web Original

This trope is the first point on Cracked writer David Christopher Bell's list of "6 Brilliant Explanations For Why Modern Movies Are So Stupid", describing it as "a juggling act of rushed sequels". He mentions several movies made solely to retain franchise rights, including the Fantastic Four, Dick Tracy, Bourne Legacy, and Hellraiser: Revelations examples listed above.

Western Animation

The 1966 adaptation of The Hobbit. Producer Bill Snyder bought the film rights from J.R.R. Tolkien on the cheap, and just before they were set to expire the popularity of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books skyrocketed. Realizing he could make a tidy return on his investment, Snyder set out to get the rights extended long enough to negotiate a resale. However, a film had to be made and released in order for that to happen. With the contract set to expire in one month, he got Gene Deitch to hastily produce a 12-minute film using still drawings, which was then screened in a single Manhattan theater on the day the contract was set to expire. With its conditions fulfilled in the narrowest possible sense, the contract was duly extended and Snyder sold the rights for $100,000 (in 1960s money). In 2012 the film finally resurfaced when Snyder's son uploaded it on YouTube.

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